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'Baker entices some of the most wonderful singing from his choir here while Robert Quinney and Houssart positively revel in their virtuoso interplay. ...'I'd recommend this CD, strongly, to any music-lover who is moved by the sound of a choir and organ in a cathedral setting' (Fanfare, USA)» More

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all gathered together in one place, alleluia. And suddenly there was a sound from heaven. like a strong wind, alleluia. And it filled the whole house, alleluia. And there appeared to them something like separate tongues of fire, which settled over each of them, alleluia. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in various languages, alleluia. Send forth your Spirit, and renew your face upon the earth, alleluia. Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of all your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love, alleluia.

The first of Maxwell Davies’s Two Latin Motets, Dum complerentur was written around the same time as the Mass, and received its premiere from the English choir Canticum, directed by Mark Forkgen, in Poole, Dorset, on 17 January 2004, as part of the Maxwell Davies seventieth birthday celebrations. The work draws on one of the two plainsong chants also used in the Mass. It is designed to be sung a cappella, as here, but with the option of a supporting (though not independent) organ part, if required. As before, the intervals of the plainsong itself, used contrapuntally, dictate both the linear unfolding of the melody and the chromatic-sounding harmony. The words, taken from the Vulgate (Acts 2), tell of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles, who were ‘all gathered together in one place’.

It is worth noting that in 2002 Maxwell Davies composed yet another work on the subject of the descent of the Holy Spirit: Linguae Ignis, for cello solo and ensemble, written for and performed by Vittorio Ceccanti and the Contempoartensemble in Florence in May 2002, which significantly, using medieval isometric processes, centres upon the gradual ‘transformation’ of one of the two plainsong chants used in the Mass (Dum complerentur) into the other (Veni Sancte Spiritus). The composer’s ‘crucible’ is, it seems – through the ‘alchemy’ of music – forever dissolving and forging anew.

Perhaps the most arresting moment in the whole motet comes quite early on: the unnerving hush of an extraordinary held chord (‘domum’), already suggested by the building, surging phrase ‘replevit totam domum’. This stilled, held chord, or moment of stasis, produces an ecstatic effect so intense and unexpected that it can suggest nobody else except Beethoven – the Ninth Symphony, or the late piano sonatas. The treble line ‘apparuerunt illis’ is imitated canonically – though with canonic variants – by tenor and bass, and the temperature and intensity rise considerably as fire seems to lick above the head of each Disciple, offset by angelic alleluias. The last section is almost as surprising – a serene, slow statement of ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda’, building to two increasingly dramatic settings of the word ‘accende’ – ‘kindle’ – before subsiding onto a slow, devout ‘alleluia’, relaxing onto a lush final cluster.

Dum complerentur is dedicated to Tim Ambler, who commissioned the Mass for The Choir of Westminster Cathedral in memory of his parents.

The second of Maxwell Davies’s Two Latin Motets, Veni Sancte Spiritus (not to be confused with the substantial twenty-minute work for soloists, chorus and orchestra which Davies composed for Princeton High School in 1963, or his Dunstable arrangement/fantasia of 1972) was written in memory of Goffredo Petrassi (1904–2003), Davies’s teacher in Rome (a dedicated and challenging one – often a lesson might last for most of a day!), who lived to the grand old age of nearly ninety-nine, and who was for almost half a century the doyen of Italy’s contemporary composers. The text, variously attributed to the eleventh, twelfth or thirteenth century and known as the ‘Golden Sequence’ (Archbishop Stephen Langton is a candidate for authorship), is of a different order from that of Veni Creator Spiritus: a benign and penitential prayer, quite unlike the dazzling irruption of the Pentecostal narrative in Dum complerentur.

Davies’s more severe, chromatic-sounding harmonies (although in this kind of linear, quasi-modal writing the word ‘chromatic’ is usually a misnomer) are, appropriately, reserved for the censorious lines ‘Lava quod est sordidum … Sana quod est saucium’. Davies’s hallmark – the interval of a diminished fifth – appears most brazenly, proceeding as a kind of ‘parallel’ fifth, at ‘Rege quod est devium’: as if the diabolus in musica would inevitably rear his head with relish at the notion of any kind of musical (or social) ‘deviance’. The rest of the motet, however, after this spiritual onslaught, is far from combative; rather it is serene: certain enraptured harmonies would not seem out of place in Howells. The closing Amen recalls both the Missa parvula and Dum complerentur before settling onto a conclusive A major chord.